My Parents’ Bedroom

I’m nine years and seven months old. I’m at home playing peekaboo in my room with my little brother, Jean. It’s Saturday evening and the sun has fallen behind the hills. There’s silence outside our bungalow, but from time to time the evening wind carries a shout to us. Our parents have kept us indoors since yesterday.

Maman comes into the room and turns off the light before we see her. Jean cries in the darkness, but once she starts kissing him he begins to giggle. He reaches up to be held, but she’s in a hurry.

“Don’t turn on any lights tonight,” she whispers to me.

I nod. “Yego, Maman.”

“Come with your brother.” I carry Jean and follow her. “And don’t open the door for anybody. Your papa is not home, I’m not home, nobody is home. Do you hear me, Monique, huh?”

Maman leads us through the corridor and into her room, where she lights a candle that she has taken from our family altar, in the parlor. She starts to undress, tossing her clothes on the floor. She tells us that she’s going out for the night and that she’s already late. She’s panting, as if she’d been running; her body is shining with sweat. She slips into the beautiful black evening dress that Papa likes and combs out her soft hair. I help her with the zipper at the back of her dress. She paints her lips a deep red and presses them together. The sequins on her dress glitter in the candlelight as if her heart were on fire.

My mother is a very beautiful Tutsi woman. She has high cheekbones, a narrow nose, a sweet mouth, slim fingers, big eyes, and a lean frame. Her skin is so light that you can see the blue veins on the back of her hands, as you can on the hands of Le Père Mertens, our parish priest, who’s from Belgium. I look like Maman, and when I grow up I’ll be as tall as she is. This is why Papa and all his Hutu people call me Shenge, which means “my little one” in Kinyarwanda.

Papa looks like most Hutus, very black. He has a round face, a wide nose, and brown eyes. His lips are as full as a banana. He is a jolly, jolly man who can make you laugh till you cry. Jean looks like him.

“But, Maman, you told me that only bad women go out at night.”

“Monique, no questions tonight, I told you.”

She stops and stares at me. As I’m about to open my mouth, she shouts, “Quiet! Go, sit with your brother!”

Maman never shouts at me. She’s strange today. Tears shine in her eyes. I pick up a bottle of Amour Bruxelles, the perfume Papa gives her because he loves her. Everybody in the neighborhood knows her by its sweet smell. When I put the bottle in her hands, she shivers, as if her mind has just returned to her. Instead of spraying it on herself, she puts it on Jean. He’s excited, sniffing his hands and clothes. I beg Maman to put some on me, but she refuses.

“When they ask you,” she says sternly, without looking at me, “say you’re one of them, O.K.?”

“Who?”

“Anybody. You have to learn to take care of Jean, Monique. You just have to, huh?”

“I will, Maman.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

Maman heads for the parlor, and Jean trails after. He’s whimpering to be held. I carry the candle. We sit down on our big sofa, and Maman blows the candle out. Our parlor is never totally dark, because of the crucifix in the corner, which glows yellow-green. All-translucent, as Papa likes to say. Jean toddles to the altar, as usual. He places his hands on the crucifix, as if playing with a toy. The glow enters into his fingers, making them green, and he turns to us and laughs. In quick strides, I bring him back. I don’t want him to pull down the crucifix, which leans against the wall, or the vase of bougainvillea beside it. It’s part of my duty to tend to the altar. I love the crucifix; all my relatives do. Except Tonton Nzeyimana—the Wizard.

The Wizard is Papa’s father’s brother. He is a pagan and he is very powerful. If he doesn’t like you, unless you’re a strong Catholic, he can put his spell on you, until you become useless. The color of his skin is milk with a little coffee. He never married because he says he hates his skin and doesn’t want to pass it on. Sometimes he paints himself with charcoal until the rain comes to wash away his blackness. I don’t know where he got his color from. My parents say it’s a complicated story about intermarriage. He’s so old that he walks with a stick. His lips are long and droopy, because he uses them to blow bad luck and disease into people. He likes to frighten children with his ugly face. Whenever I see the Wizard, I run away. Papa, his own nephew, doesn’t want him in our house, but Maman tolerates the Wizard. “No matter, he’s our relative,” she says. Tonton André, Papa’s only brother, hates him even more. They don’t even greet each other on the road.

Though I’m a girl, Papa says that the crucifix will be mine when he dies, because I’m the firstborn of the family. I will carry it till I give it to my child. Some people laugh at Papa for saying that it’ll come to me, a girl. Others shrug and agree with Papa, because he went to university and works in a government ministry. Sometimes when Tonton André and his wife, Tantine Annette, visit us, they praise Papa for this decision. Tantine Annette is pregnant, and I know that they would do the same if God gave them a girl first.

Without his I.D., you’d never know that Tonton André is Papa’s brother. He’s a cross between Papa and Maman—as tall as Maman but not quite as dark as Papa. He’s got a tiny beard. Tantine Annette is Maman’s best friend. Though she’s Tutsi like Maman, she’s as dark as Papa. Sometimes on the road, the police ask for her I.D., to be sure of her roots. These days, my parents tease her that she’ll give birth to six babies, because her pregnant stomach is very big. Each time she becomes pregnant, she miscarries, and everybody knows that it’s the Wizard’s spell. But the couple have been strong in their faith. Sometimes they kiss in public, like Belgians do on TV, and our people don’t like this very much. But they don’t care. Tonton André takes her to a good hospital in Kigali for checkups, and Papa and our other relatives contribute money to help them, because both of them are only poor primary-school teachers. The Wizard offered to give his money, too, but we don’t allow him to. If he gave even one franc, his bad money would swallow all the good contributions, like the sickly, hungry cows in Pharaoh’s dream.

Maman stands up suddenly. “Monique, remember to lock the door behind me! Your papa will soon be back.” I hear her going into the kitchen. She opens the back door and stops for a moment. Then the door slams. She’s gone.

Ilight the candle again and go into the kitchen and lock the door. We eat rice and fish and return to our room. I dress Jean in his flannel pajamas and sing him to sleep. I change into my nightie, and lie down beside him.

In a dream, I hear Tonton André’s voice. He sounds as anxious as he did yesterday afternoon, when he came to call Papa away. “Shenge, Shenge, you must open the door for me!” Tonton André shouts.

“Wait, I’m coming,” I try to tell him, but in my dream I have no voice, and my legs have melted like butter in the sun. There’s a lot of commotion, and gunshots that sound like bombs.

“Come to the front door, quick!” he shouts again.

I wake up. Tonton André is actually yelling outside our house.

I go into the parlor and turn on the fluorescent lights. My eyes hurt. People are banging on our front door. I see the blades of machetes and axes stabbing through the door, making holes in the plywood. Two windows are smashed, and rifle butts and udufuni are poking in. I don’t know what’s going on. The attackers can’t get in through the windows with their guns and small hoes, because they’re covered with metal bars. Afraid, I squat on the floor, with my hands covering my head, till the people outside stop and pull back.

I hear Tonton André’s voice again, but this time it’s calm and deep, as usual, and everything is quiet outside.

They look victorious, like football champions. I know some of them. Our church usher, Monsieur Paschal, is humming and chanting and wears a bandanna. Mademoiselle Angeline, my teacher’s daughter, is dancing to the chants, as if to reggae beats. She gives a thumbs-up to Monsieur François, who is the preacher at the nearby Adventist church.

Some of them brandish their I.D.s, as if they were conducting a census. Others are now searching our home. Sniffing around like dogs, they’ve traced Maman’s Amour Bruxelles to Jean and are bothering him so he begins to cry. I run to our room and carry him back to the parlor. I can hear them all over the place, overturning beds and breaking down closets.

Suddenly, I see the Wizard by the altar. He turns and winks at me. Then he swings his stick at the crucifix, once, twice, and Christ’s body breaks from the cross, crashing to the floor. Limbless, it rolls to my feet. Only bits of its hands and legs are still hanging on the cross, hollow and jagged. The cross has fallen off the altar, too. The Wizard smiles at me, enjoying my frustration. When he’s distracted for a moment, I grab Jesus’ broken body and hide it under Jean’s pajama top. I sit down on the sofa and put Jean on my lap. The Wizard now searches excitedly for the body of Jesus. He is like an overgrown kid looking for his toy.

He turns to me. “Shenge, do you have it?”

I look away. “No.”

“Look at me, girl.”

“I don’t have it.”

I hold on tighter to Jean.

The Wizard switches off the lights. Jean bursts into laughter, because now his stomach glows like Jesus. The Wizard turns the lights on again and comes toward us, smiling a bad smile. Jean is not afraid of the old man. When the Wizard reaches for Jesus, Jean fights him off, bending almost double to protect his treasure. The Wizard is laughing, but Jean bites the man’s fingers with his eight teeth. I wish he had iron teeth and could bite off the Wizard’s whole hand, because it’s not funny. But the old man teases us, dangling his tongue and making stupid faces. When he laughs, you can see his gums and all the pits left by his fallen teeth. Now wheezing from too much laughter, he snatches Christ’s body from Jean and puts it in his pagan pocket.

Tonton André is bitter and restless. Since I told him that my parents have gone out, he hasn’t spoken to me. I’m angry at him, too, because he lied to get in and now the Wizard has destroyed my crucifix and stolen Christ’s body.

When I hear noises in my parents’ room, I run in there with Jean, because my parents never allow visitors in their bedroom. There are two men rummaging through their closet. One man is bald and wearing stained yellow trousers, the bottoms rolled up—no shirt, no shoes. He has a few strands of hair on his chest, and his belly is huge and firm. The other man is young, secondary-school age. His hair and beard are very neat, as if he were coming from the barber. He’s bug-eyed and tall and is wearing jean overalls, a T-shirt, and dirty blue tennis shoes.

The big-bellied man looks at the younger man mischievously and asks me to hug him. Before I can say anything, he wriggles out of his yellow trousers and reaches for me. But I avoid his hands and slip under the bed with Jean. He pulls me out by my ankles. Pressing me down on the floor, the naked man grabs my two wrists with his left hand. He pushes up my nightie with the right and tears my underpants. I shout at the top of my voice. I call out to Tonton André, who is pacing in the corridor. He doesn’t come. I keep screaming. I’m twisting and holding my knees together. Then I snap at the naked man with my teeth. He hits my face, this way and that, until my saliva is salted with blood. I spit in his face. Twice. He bangs my head on the floor, pinning my neck down, punching my left thigh.

“Oya! No! Shenge is one of us!” the Wizard tells him, rushing into the room.

“Ah . . . leave this little thing . . . to me,” the naked man says slowly. His short pee is pouring on my thighs and my nightie, warm and thick like baby food. I can’t breathe, because he has collapsed on me with his whole weight, like a dead man. When he finally gets up, hiding his nakedness with his trousers, the Wizard bends down, peering at me, and breathes a sigh of relief.

“Shenge, can you hear me?” the Wizard says.

“Ummh.”

“I say, you’re all right!”

“All right.”

“Bad days, girl, bad days. Be strong.” He turns to my attacker and growls, “You’re lucky you didn’t open her womb. I would’ve strangled you myself!”

“Jean,” I whisper. “Where’s my brother?”

The overalls man finds him under the bed, curled up like a python, and drags him out. Jean lays his big head on my chest. An ache beats in my head as if the man were still banging it on the floor. My eyes show me many men in yellow trousers and overalls, many Wizards. The floor is rising and falling. I try to keep my eyes open but can’t. Jean keeps feeling my busted mouth.

Someone lifts me and Jean up and takes us back to the parlor. Tonton André is sitting between two men, who are consoling him. He’s got his head in his hands, and the Wizard is standing behind him, patting his shoulder gently.

As soon as Tonton André sees us, he springs to his feet. But they pull him down and scold him and tell him to get ahold of himself. He’s not listening, though.

“My bastard brother and his wife are not home?” he says very slowly, as if he were coming out of a deep sleep. “He owes me this one. And I’m killing these children if I don’t see him.”

“My nephew,” the Wizard says, thudding his stick once on the floor. “Don’t worry. He must pay, too. Nobody can escape our wrath this time. Nobody.”

“Koko, ni impamo tuzabigira,” people start murmuring in agreement.

I don’t know what Papa could owe his younger brother. Papa is richer than he is. Whatever it is, I’m sure that he’ll repay him tomorrow.

The crowd calms down. People stand in groups and carry out their conversations, like women at the market. I get the impression that there are more people outside. Only Monsieur François is impatient, telling the others to hurry up so that they can go elsewhere, that the government didn’t buy them machetes and guns to be idle.

After a while, the Wizard leaves Tonton André and comes over to us. “Young girl,” he says, “you say you don’t know where your parents are?”

“I don’t know,” I say.

“When they return, tell them all the roads are blocked. No escape. And you, clever girl,” the old man says, tapping me on the chest, “if you want to live, don’t leave this house for anything. Ghosts are all over our land. Bad ghosts.” He whisks his cane and tosses his head as if he were commanding the ghosts into existence. And then he goes out, in the flow of the crowd.

I lock up as soon as everyone has left. The flowers are crushed, the altar cloth trampled upon. Pieces of glass are everywhere. The drawers from the writing desk are hanging out, and the bookshelf has fallen over. The TV is now facing the wall, and a cold wind ruffles the window blinds. I find the cross, and put it back on the altar.

I want to sleep, but fear follows me into my room. My fingers are shivering. My head feels heavy and swollen. There’s a pebble in my left thigh where the naked man hit me. My mouth is still bleeding, staining the front of my nightie. I shouldn’t have tricked the Wizard. What are the ghosts he summoned going to do to us? He has put his spell on Tonton André, too. Jean is covered in goose bumps. I’m too afraid to tidy up our room. We huddle in one corner, on the mattress, which has been tossed onto the floor. I start to pray.

I wake to the sound of my parents and other people arguing in the parlor. There’s a lot of noise. It’s not yet dawn, and my whole body is sore. One side of my upper lip is swollen as if I had a toffee between it and my gum. I don’t see Jean.

I limp into the parlor but see only my parents and Jean. Maybe I was dreaming the other voices. My parents stop talking as soon as they see me. Maman is seated on the sofa like a statue of Marie Mère des Douleurs, looking down. Papa stands near the altar, holding Jean and scooping hot spoonfuls of oatmeal into his mouth. Jean’s eyes are dull and watery, as if he hadn’t slept for days. Shaking his head, he shrieks and pushes the food away. “Eat up, kid, eat up,” Papa says impatiently. “You’ll need the energy.”

My family isn’t preparing for Mass this Sunday morning. The parlor lights are off, the furniture still scattered from last night. The doors and windows are closed, as they have been since Friday, and the dinner table is now pushed up against the front door. Our home feels haunted, as if the ghosts from the Wizard’s stick were still inside.

I hurry toward my father. “Good morning, Papa!”

“Sh-h-h . . . yeah, good morning,” he whispers. He puts Jean down on the floor and squats and holds my two hands. “No noise. Don’t be afraid. I won’t let anyone touch you again, O.K.?”

“Yego, Papa.”

I want to hug him, but he blocks me with his hands. “Don’t turn on any lights, and don’t bother Maman now.”

“The Wizard said that ghosts are—”

“No ghosts here. . . . Listen, no Mass today. Le Père Mertens went on home leave last week.” He’s not looking at me but peering out through the window.

I hear a sneeze from the kitchen, stifled like a sick cat’s. I search my parents’ faces, but they’re blank. A sudden fear enters my body. Maybe I’m still dreaming, maybe not. I push closer to Papa and ask him, “Tonton André is now friends with the Wizard?”

“Don’t mention André in my house anymore.”

“He brought a man to tear my underpants.”

“I say leave me alone!”

He goes to the window and holds on to the iron bars so that his hands are steady, but his body is trembling. His eyes are blinking fast and his face is tightened. When Papa gets quiet like this, he’s ready to pounce on anyone. I go to the sofa and sit down silently. When I slide over to Maman, she pushes me away with one hand. I resist, bending like a tree in the wind, then returning to my position. Nothing interests Maman today, not even Jean, her favorite child. She doesn’t say any sweet thing to him or even touch him today. She acts dumb, bewitched, like a goat that the neighborhood children have fed sorghum beer.

From the window, Papa turns and looks at me as if I’m no longer his sweet Shenge. When he sees Jean sleeping on the carpet by Maman’s feet, he puts the blame on me: “Stubborn girl, have you no eyes to see that your brother needs a bed? Put him in the bedroom and stop disturbing my life.”

But I circle the parlor, like an ant whose hole has been blocked. I am scared to go to my room, because of the ghosts. Papa grabs my wrist and drags me into my room. He turns on the light. Our toys litter the floor. He puts the mattress back on the bed and rearranges the room. But it’s still messy. Papa is cursing the toys, destroying the special treats that he and Maman bought for us when they visited America. He kicks the Teddy bear against the wall and stamps on Tweety and Mickey Mouse. Papa’s hands are very dirty, the gutters around his nails swollen with black mud. When he sees me looking at him, he says, “What are you staring at?”

“I’m sorry, Papa.”

“I told you not to turn on the lights. Who turned on this light?” I turn off the light. “Go get your stupid brother and put him to bed. You must love him.”

“Yego, Papa.”

I go to the parlor and hope that Maman will intervene. She doesn’t, so I bring Jean back to the bed.

“And stay here, girl,” Papa says. He goes back to the parlor, slamming the door.

When I was younger, I used to ride into the hills on Papa’s wide shoulders. We were always visiting Maman’s family’s place, in the next valley. Papa told me that when he first met Maman she was my age, and they played together in these hills. They went to the same primary school and university.

In the hills, you can see the clouds moving away, like incense smoke in a church. Our country is full of winds, and in the hills they blow at your eyes until tears stain your cheeks. They suck through the valleys, like hungry cows. The birds rise and tumble and swing, their voices mixing with the winds. When Papa laughs his jolly-jolly laugh, the winds carry his voice, too. From the top of the hills, you can see that the earth is red. You can see stands of banana and plantain trees, their middle leaves rolled up, like yellow-green swords slicing the wind. You can see fields of coffee, with farmers wading through them, piggybacking their baskets. When you climb the hills in the dry season, your feet are powdered with dust. When it rains, the red earth runs like blood under a green skin. There are tendrils everywhere, and insects come out of the soil.

I walk tall and proud in our neighborhood. The bullies all know that Papa would attack anyone who messes with me. Even when he is drunk on banana beer, my tears sober him. Sometimes he even goes after Maman, for making his girl sad. He scolds his relatives when they say that it’s risky that I look so much like Maman. Papa likes to tell me that he wanted to go against his people and wed Maman in our church when I was born, even though she hadn’t given him a son yet. Maman wouldn’t hear of it, he says. She wanted to give him a male child before they had the sacrament of matrimony. Papa tells me everything.

Maman’s love for me is different. Sometimes she looks at me and becomes sad. She never likes going out in public with me, as she does with Jean. She is always tense, as if a lion will leap out and eat us.

“Maman, I’ll always be beautiful!” I told her one day, as Papa was driving us back from a lakeside picnic. Maman was in the passenger’s seat, Jean on her lap. I was behind.

“You could be beautiful in other ways, Monique,” she said.

“Leave the poor girl alone,” Papa told her.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“You will when you grow up,” she said.

This time when I wake up, rays of yellow morning are leaking in through the holes in the door and the torn blinds. They riddle the gloom, and I can see dust particles dancing within them. Our neighborhood is quiet. When I go into the parlor, Papa is moving from window to window to insure that the blinds leave no space for outsiders to peep in. Maman is standing at the table, straining her eyes as she examines two framed photographs.

One is from my parents’ traditional wedding. It’s ten years old. I was in Maman’s belly then. All the women are elegantly dressed, the imyitero draping over them like Le Père Mertens’s short vestment. Married women who have given birth to sons wear urugoli crowns. Maman got hers only last year, when Jean was born. There are some cows tethered in the background. They were part of the dowry Papa offered for Maman. But no matter what I try to focus on, my eyes go to Tonton André’s smiley face. I cover it with my hand, but Maman pushes my fingers off. I look at the other picture instead, which was taken last year, after my parents’ church wedding. Papa, Maman, and I are in front. I’m the flower girl, my hands gloved and a flower basket hanging down from my neck with white ribbons. Maman holds baby Jean close to her heart, like a wedding bouquet.

“Maman, Jean is lonely in the bedroom,” I say.

“I hope he sleeps the whole day,” she says, without looking at me.

“Won’t ghosts steal him?”

“He’ll get used to them. Go get yourself some food, Monique.”

“Oya, Maman, I don’t want to eat.”

“Then go and shower.”

“Alone? I don’t want to shower.”

She touches my nightie. “You need to shower.”

“Maman, when wizards pee . . .”

“Don’t tell me now.” She looks at Papa. “She needs a shower.”

Hearing this, I raise my nightie to show Maman my swollen thigh, but she slaps it down, saying, “You’ll get a new pair of underpants. Your face will be beautiful again.”

I return my attention to the pictures. I scratch at Tonton André’s face with my nails to erase him from our family. But the glass saves him.

Maman isn’t looking at the photos anymore; her eyes are closed, as if in prayer. I pick up a brass letter opener and begin to scratch the glass over my Tonton’s face. The sound distracts Papa from the window and he gives me a bad look. I stop.

“Why did you come down—come back?” he says to Maman, searching my face to see whether I’ve understood the question.

I haven’t.

He turns back to Maman. “Woman, why? Return to where you were last night. Please. Leave.”

“Whatever you do,” she says, “do not let my daughter know.”

“She should!” he says, then recoils from the force in his own voice.

My parents are hiding something from me. Maman is very stubborn about it. Their sentences enter my ears as randomly as a toss of the dice on our Ludo board. Papa looks guilty, like a child who can’t keep a secret.

“I can’t bear it,” he says. “I can’t.”

“If Monique knew where I was last night,” Maman argues, “your family would’ve forced it out of her and shed blood.”

As they talk, invisible people are breathing everywhere—at least twenty ghosts are in the air around us. When Maman speaks, the ghosts let out groans of agreement, but my parents don’t seem to hear them.

Papa shakes his head. “I mean, you should never have come back. I could have convinced them . . .”

“We needed to be with the children.”

I don’t understand why Maman is saying she wants to be with me when she won’t even look my way. I see dirty water dripping down the white wall beside me. It is coming from the ceiling. At first, it comes down in two thin lines. Then the lines widen and swell into one. Then two more lines come down, in spurts, like little spiders gliding down on threads from a branch of the mango tree in our yard. I touch the liquid with the tip of my finger. Blood.

“Ghost! Ghost!” I scream, diving toward Papa.

“It’s not blood,” he says.

“You are lying! It’s blood! It’s blood!”

Papa tries to get between me and the wall, but I get in front of him and hug him. I cling to his body, climbing upward until my hands are around his neck and my legs wrapped around his waist. He tries to muffle my shouts with his hands, but I wriggle and twist till he bows under my weight, and we nearly topple over. He staggers and regains his balance, then he releases his breath, and his stiff body softens. He puts his arms around me and carries me to the sofa. He holds my face to his heart, hiding me from the blood. I stop shouting. Maman is grinding her teeth, and there is a stubborn look on her face—maybe the Wizard has fixed her, too.

My body continues to tremble, no matter how hard Papa holds me. I tell him about last night, and he consoles me, telling me not to cry. Tears fill his eyes, too, then pour down onto me, warm and fast. I’ve never seen him cry before. Now he can’t stop, like me. He’s telling me he will always love me, putting my head on his shoulder, stroking my braided hair. Once again, I’m Papa’s Shenge.

“They’re good ghosts,” he sobs, kissing my forehead. “Good people who died.”

“Papa, I tricked the Wizard.”

“Don’t think of last night.”

He gives me a piggyback ride to the bathroom. He takes off my nightie and tosses it into the dustbin, then turns on the taps to run the bath. In the walls, the pipes whistle and sigh, but today it feels as if I were hearing the blood flowing through the strange veins of ghosts. The heat of the bath sends mist through the room, and Papa moves within it, still sobbing and wiping his tears with the sleeve of his shirt.

When he cleans my face, his hands smell like raw eggs. I reach out and switch on the light; his dirty hands seem to shock him. He washes them in the sink. We’re sweating in the heat and the steam. But when I try to pull back the window blinds, he stops me. In the mirror, my mouth looks as if I’d been dropped on it. I can’t brush my teeth. With warm water and iodine from the closet, he cleanses my lip.

He leaves me to wash myself, tells me that I should not be afraid; he’ll be right outside the door. After the bath, he goes with me to my room, and I dress in a pair of jeans and a pink T-shirt.

Back in the parlor, we sit together, away from the blood wall, my head on his shoulder. I’m hungry. He offers to make me food, but I say no, because I can’t move my mouth to eat.

“Look, we cannot run away from this,” Maman says.

Papa shrugs. “But I cannot do it. How do I do it?”

They’re talking about secret things again.

“You can,” she says. “Yesterday you did it to Annette.”

“I should never have gone to André’s place yesterday. Big mistake.”

“We owe André our coöperation. He’s a madman now.”

Papa goes to the window, and looks out. “I think we should run to those U.N. soldiers by the street corner.”

“Ndabyanze! No way! If your brother doesn’t get what he wants when he returns, he will hurt all of us.”

Outside, the mid-morning sun is now very bright, and, though the blinds are still drawn, I can see my parents’ clothes clearly now. Papa’s light-brown jeans are covered with dark stains. Maman is very dirty, her dress covered with dust and dirt, as if she’d been wrestling on the ground all night. She smells of sweat. I knew that it was a bad idea for her to go out last night; she never goes out at night. She tells me that there are many bad women who do, because Rwanda is getting poorer and poorer.

“Maman, Maman!” Jean shrieks suddenly. He must be having a nightmare. She shakes her head guiltily but doesn’t go to him, as if she’d lost her right to be our mother. I go with Papa into our bedroom, and Jean climbs all over him, but wails for Maman. A muffled sneeze breaks the silence again. A ghost is gasping for air, as if it were being stifled. We hold on to Papa, who has brought holy water into the bedroom with him.

“It’s O.K., it’s O.K.,” Papa says, looking around and sprinkling the holy water, as if he has come to console the ghosts, not us. Together we listen to the ghost’s raspy breathing. The breaths come further and further apart. They stop. Papa and the other ghosts start to sigh, as if the ailing one had died a second death. There are tears in Papa’s eyes, and his mouth is moving without words. He is commanding ghosts, like the Wizard, but without a stick.

Someone begins to pound on our front door. Papa quickly hands Jean to me. “Don’t open the door!” he hisses to Maman in the parlor, then turns to me. “And don’t take your brother out there!” He stays with us, but his mind is in the parlor, where we can hear Maman pushing aside the table, opening the front door, and whispering to people. We hear chairs and tables being moved. Then there’s a grating sound. On the roof, I can hear big birds flapping their wings for takeoff. Then quiet. The people must have left, and Maman is alone again in the parlor.

Somebody wails in a house down the road. Jean begins to cry. I pat him on the back and sing for him in a whisper. He’s licking his lips, because he wants food. Papa takes us into the parlor and offers Jean the remains of the oatmeal. He chews the cold chunks hungrily. “Young man, I told you to eat the whole thing in the morning,” Papa says. “You children are a burden to us!” He gives me bread slices and milk from the fridge. I soak the slices and swallow them without chewing.

A mob is chanting in the distance; it sounds like it’s making its way toward our house. Papa goes to the window. Another voice begins to wail. A third voice, a fourth, a fifth, a child’s—it sounds like my friend Hélène. Before I can say anything, Papa says, “Shenge, forget about that Twa girl.”

Hélène and I sit next to each other at school. She’s the brightest in our class, and during recreation we jump rope together in the schoolyard. She’s petite and hairy, with a flat forehead like a monkey. Most of the Twa people are like that. They’re few in our country. My parents say that they’re peaceful and that when the world talks about our country they’re never mentioned.

Hélène is an orphan, because the Wizard fixed her parents last year. Mademoiselle Angeline said that he cursed them with AIDS by throwing his gris-gris over their roof. Now Papa is paying Hélène’s school fees. We’re also in the same catechism class and Papa has promised to throw a joint party for our first Holy Communion. Last year, Hélène took the first prize in community service in our class—organized by Le Père Mertens. I came in second. We fetched the most buckets of water for old people in the neighborhood. He said if you’re Hutu you should fetch for the Tutsis or the Twa. If you’re Tutsi, you do it for the Hutus or the Twa. If you’re Twa, you serve the other two. Being both Tutsi and Hutu, I fetched for everybody with my small bucket.

“We can’t take her in,” Papa says, and shrugs. “And how does this crisis concern the Twa?”

Suddenly, Maman yanks the table away from the door again and unlocks it. But she doesn’t open the door, just leans on it. More choked cries crack the day like a whip. There are gunshots in the distance. Papa approaches Maman, his hands shaking. He locks the door and takes her back to her seat. He pushes the table back against the door.

Maman stands up suddenly and pulls out the biggest roll of money I’ve ever seen from inside her dress. The notes are squeezed and damp, as if she had been holding on to them all night. “This should help for a while,” she says, offering the roll to Papa. “I hope the banks will reopen soon.” He doesn’t touch the money. “For our children, then,” she says, placing the money on the table.

I tell Papa, “We must give the money to Tonton André to pay him back.”

Her lips quake as if she has malaria. Papa pulls his I.D. from his back pocket and considers the details with disgust. He gets Maman’s card out of his pocket, too. Joining the two together, he tears them into large pieces, then into tiny pieces, like confetti. He puts the scraps on the table and goes back to his security post at the window. Then he comes back and gathers them up, but he can’t repair the damage. He puts the pieces into his pocket.

Evening is falling. Maman walks stiffly across the room and kneels by the altar. Papa speaks to her, but she doesn’t reply. He touches her and she begins to sob.

“By this, your Shenge’s crucifix,” Maman says, getting up, “promise me you won’t betray the people who’ve run to us for safety.”

He nods. “I promise . . . ndakwijeje.”

Slowly, Maman removes the gold ring from her finger and holds it out for Papa.

“Sell this and take care of yourself and the children.”

Papa backs away, his eyes closed. When he opens them, they’re clouded, like a rainy day. Maman comes over to me and places the money on my palms and puts the ring on top of it.

“Don’t go away, Maman. Papa loves you.”

“I know, Monique, I know.”

“Is it because you went out last night?”

“No, no, I did not go out last night!” she says. I leave everything on the altar, kneel in front of Papa, and beg him with all my love to forgive her though she’s lying. He turns away. I go back to the sofa. “Your papa is a good man,” Maman says, hugging me.

I push Jean against her, but she avoids his eyes. I think of Le Père Mertens. I plead with Maman to wait for him to return from Belgium to reconcile them. “If you confess to Le Père Mertens,” I say, “Jesus shall forgive you.”

There’s a light knock on the door. Maman sits up, pushing Jean off like a scorpion. Someone is crying softly outside our door. Maman walks past Papa to push aside the table and open the door. It’s Hélène. She’s sprawled on our doorstep. Maman quickly carries her inside, and Papa locks the door.

Hélène is soaked in blood and has been crawling through the dust. Her right foot is dangling on strings, like a shoe tied to the clothesline by its lace. Papa binds her foot with a towel, but the blood soaks through. I hold her hand, which is cold and sticky.

I can hear a mob coming, but my parents are more interested in Hélène. Papa climbs onto a chair, then onto the table. He opens the hatch of the parlor ceiling and asks Maman to relay Hélène to him.

“Remember, we’ve too many up there,” Maman says. “When I came down, you had five in there . . . and I put two more in just hours ago. The ceiling will collapse.”

They take Hélène into our room, and Maman pulls open the hatch. A cloud of fine dust explodes into the room from the ceiling. They shove Hélène’s body in.

Now I understand—they are hiding people in our ceiling. Maman was in the ceiling last night. She tricked me. Nobody is telling me the truth today. Tomorrow I must remind them that lying is a sin.

As the mob closes in on the house, chanting, the ceiling people begin to pray. I recognize their voices as those of our Tutsi neighbors and fellow-parishioners. They’re silent as Papa opens the front door to the crowd, which is bigger than last night and pushes into our home like floodwater. These people look tired, yet they sing on like drunks. Their weapons and hands and shoes and clothes are covered with blood, their palms slimy. Our house smells suddenly like an abattoir. I see the man who attacked me; his yellow trousers are now reddish brown. He stares at me; I hold on to Papa, who is hanging his head.

Maman runs into her bedroom. Four men are restraining Tonton André, who still wants to kill us all. I run to Maman and sit with her on the bed. Soon, the mob enters the room, too, bringing Papa. They give Papa a big machete. He begins to tremble, his eyes blinking. A man tears me away from Maman and pushes me toward Jean, who’s in the corner. Papa is standing before Maman, his fingers on the knife’s handle.

“My people,” he mumbles, “let another do it. Please.”

“No, you do it, traitor!” Tonton André shouts, struggling with those holding him. “You were with us when I killed Annette yesterday. My pregnant wife. You can’t keep yours. Where did you disappear to when we came last night? You love your family more than I loved mine? Yes?”

“If we kill your wife for you,” the Wizard says, “we must kill you. And your children, too.” He thuds his stick. “Otherwise, after cleansing our land of Tutsi nuisance, your children will come after us. We must remain one. Nothing shall dilute our blood. Not God. Not marriage.”

Papa lands the machete on Maman’s head. Her voice chokes and she falls off the bed and onto her back on the wooden floor. It’s like a dream. The knife tumbles out of Papa’s hand. His eyes are closed, his face calm, though he’s shaking.

Maman straightens out on the floor as if she were yawning. Her feet kick, and her chest rises and locks as if she were holding her breath. There’s blood everywhere—on everybody around her. It flows into Maman’s eyes. She looks at us through the blood. She sees Papa become a wizard, sees his people telling him bad things. The blood overflows her eyelids, and Maman is weeping red tears. My bladder softens and pee flows down my legs toward the blood. The blood overpowers it, bathing my feet. Papa opens his eyes slowly. His breaths are long and slow. He bends down and closes Maman’s eyes with shaky hands.

“If you let any Tutsi live,” they tell him, “you’re dead.” And then they begin to leave, some patting him on the back. Tonton André is calm now, stroking his goatee. He tugs at Papa’s sleeve. Papa covers Maman with a white bedspread and then goes off with the mob, without looking at me or Jean. Maman’s ring and money disappear with them.

I cry with the ceiling people until my voice cracks and my tongue dries up. No one can ever call me Shenge again. I want to sit with Maman forever, and I want to run away at the same time. Sometimes I think she’s sleeping and hugging Hélène under the bedspread and the blood is Hélène’s. I don’t want to wake them up. My mind is no longer mine; it’s doing things on its own. It begins to run backward, and I see the blood flowing back into Maman. I see her rising suddenly, as suddenly as she fell. I see Papa’s knife lifting from her hair. She’s saying, “Me promised you.”

“Yes, Maman,” I say. “You promised me!”

Jean is startled by my shout. He stamps around in the blood, as if he were playing in mud.

I begin to think of Maman as one of the people in the ceiling. It’s not safe for her to come down yet. She’s lying up there quietly, holding on to the rafters, just as she must have been last night when the man in the yellow trousers attacked me. She’s waiting for the right time to cry with me. I think that Tonton André is hiding Tantine Annette in his ceiling and fooling everyone into believing that he killed her. I see her lying, face up, on a wooden beam, with her mountain belly, the way I lie on the lowest branch of our mango tree and try to count the fruit. Soon, Tonton André will bring her down gently. She’ll give birth, and my uncle will cover her mouth with Belgian kisses.

Jean yanks the cloth off Maman and tries to wake her. He straightens her finger, but it bends back slowly, as if she were teasing him. He sticks his fingers into Maman’s hair and kneads it, the blood thick like red shampoo. As the ceiling people weep, he wipes his hands on her clothes and walks outside, giggling.

I wander from room to room, listening for her voice among the ceiling voices. When there’s silence, her presence fills my heart.

“Just be patient,” someone close to her says. “We’ll send the dead down carefully before they fall through.”

Some praise God for the way my parents’ marriage has saved them. Grandmaman de Martin becomes hysterical, forcing everyone else to rearrange themselves in the ceiling in the hallway. I identify each voice, but Maman’s voice isn’t there. Why hasn’t she said something to me? Why doesn’t she order me to go and shower?

All the things that Maman used to tell me come at me at once, and yet separately—in play, in anger, in fear. There is a command, a lullaby, the sound of her kiss on my cheek. Perhaps she is still trying to protect me from what is to come. She’s capable of doing that, I know, just as she stopped Papa from telling me that he was going to smash her head.

“I’m waiting for Maman,” I tell the ceiling people.

“She’s gone, Monique.”

“No, no, I know now. She’s up there.”

“Yagiye hehe? Where?”

“Stop lying! Tell my mother to talk to me.”

The parlor ceiling is now creaking and sagging in the middle, and Madame Thérèse starts to laugh like a drunk. “You’re right, Monique. We’re just kidding. Smart girl, yes, your maman is here but she will come down only if you go outside to get Jean. She’s had a long day.”

“Yego, Madame,” I say, “wake her up.”

“She’s hearing you,” Monsieur Pierre Nsabimana says suddenly from the kitchen. He hasn’t said anything all this while. His voice calms me, and I move toward it, my eyes fixed on the ceiling. Someone begins the Catena in a harsh, rapid whisper. It’s not Maman. She always takes her time to say her prayer.

“Do you want your maman to fall with the ceiling on you?” Monsieur Pierre says.

“No.”

“Then, girl, leave the house, and don’t come back!”

The ceiling above the altar begins to tear apart from the wall and people scurry away from that end, like giant lizards. I pick up the broken crucifix and hurry outside.

There are corpses everywhere. Their clothes are dancing in the wind. Where blood has soaked the earth, the grass doesn’t move. Vultures are poking the dead with their long beaks; Jean is driving them away, stamping his feet and swirling his arms. His hands are stained, because he’s been trying to raise the dead. He’s not laughing anymore. His eyes are wide open, and there’s a frown on his babyish forehead.

Then he wanders toward the U.N. soldiers at the corner, their rifles shiny in the twilight. They’re walking away from him, as if they were a mirage. The vultures are following Jean. I scream at them, but they continue to taunt him, like stubborn mosquitoes. Jean doesn’t hear. He sits on the ground, kicking his legs and crying because the soldiers won’t wait for him. I squat before my brother, begging him to climb on my back. He does and keeps quiet.

We limp on into the chilly night, ascending the stony road into the hills. The blood has dried into our clothes like starch. There’s a smaller mob coming toward us. Monsieur Henri is among them. He’s carrying a huge torch, and the flame is eating the night in large, windy gulps. These are our people on Maman’s side, and they’re all in military clothes. Like another football fan club, they’re chanting about how they’re going to kill Papa’s people. Some of them have guns. If Papa couldn’t spare Maman’s life, would my mother’s relatives spare mine? Or my brother’s?

I slip into the bush, with Jean on my back, one hand holding the crucifix, the other shielding my eyes from the tall grass and the branches, my feet cold and bracing for thorns. Jean presses hard against me, his face digging into my back. “Maman says do not be afraid,” I tell him. Then we lie down on the crucifix to hide its brightness. We want to live; we don’t want to die. I must be strong.

After the mob runs past us, I return to the road and look back. They drag Maman out by the legs and set fire to the house. By the time their fellow-Tutsis in the ceiling begin to shout, the fire is unstoppable. They run on. They run after Papa’s people. We walk forward. Everywhere is dark, and the wind spreads black clouds like blankets across the sky. My brother is toying with the glow of the crucifix, babbling like mad. ♦